← All essaysDecember 15, 2022

Why You're Still Underestimating the Internet

"I've found my favorite modern-day philosophers to be on Twitter," I said with certainty over our Thanksgiving meal to a family member.

"...what?" was their response.

To them, Twitter is a cesspool of incoherent political ramblings and trolls.

"The learning hasn't stopped there. I've learned more about mental health, nutrition, finance, marketing, and dating from the internet than my entire education experience combined."

"Oh wow," the relative responded, then quickly went back to dismantling their mashed potatoes.

They didn't get it.

To them, the "experts" and the world's smartest people could be found in books or on MSNBC.

They are right about the trolls but are blind to the high-quality thinkers.

"The internet increases variance," as Balaji Srinivasan so wisely put it on Twitter.

It ups the volume and intensity of nonsense, but it also ups the amplitude of the other side of the spectrum: wisdom, creativity, and mind expansion. So yes, there is high-quality content in traditional media, but analog outlets can never outcompete the long tail of the internet.

I just happen to be the weirdo at the table who's been living on the internet for the past 8 years and happened to notice the positive end of the extremes.

Case in point: the internet is underestimated by the majority of the population.

Still.

Most people — not just Boomers, even those in Gen-Z — haven't caught on to its power yet. Even when you recognize that it's transformed payments, media, dating, and dozens of other industries.

I've been searching for answers, like a sinner trying to find Jesus, to find some semblance of signal that served me — and I finally did.

Through identifying intelligent content created by authors with integrity, I've:

Perhaps 10 years from now I won't be the minority at our holiday gatherings, or maybe the world will bifurcate between self-educators and those who need the "experts."

Who knows.

I do know that most of the population still doesn't comprehend where this open web of knowledge is heading.

Let's explore four domains the internet will radically transform, that most people aren't aware of, over the coming decades.

1. On internet education

I've expanded and rearranged the way I look at the world and how I approach my career simply by reading Naval Ravikant's tweets, watching Balaji Srinivasan interviews, and listening to Tim Ferriss podcasts. I completed a 9-month certification in web development as a direct result of a Naval Ravikant Twitter thread on building wealth.

It still blows my mind that thought leaders of that caliber can publish their wisdom for free, for anyone to consume. Imagine if Seneca had a Twitter account, Alan Watts had a YouTube channel, or Socrates made those silly Instagram quotes.

They are the college professors I would have killed for as a young adult.

Imagine a world where everyone is an autodidact and can act on that new knowledge. How healthy could we all get, collectively? How many innovative businesses could be built? How many relationships would become stronger and healthier as a result?

I hope that's where we're headed as a society. At least for now, a small percentage of us are leading the way.

"But what about MOOCs, Peter? We've had massive open online courses for well over a decade and not everyone is an Einstein yet!"

Of course, we haven't reached education paradise yet. But as more people become aware of the vastness of content that speaks to them directly, and act on it, I think culture will change.

2. On internet money and property rights

Western civilization stands on two core pillars: property rights and contract law. Without them, we'd devolve into feudalism or some form of chaos.

Thanks to a pseudonymous software engineer named Satoshi Nakamoto, and the internet, humanity found a way to decouple property rights from the nation-state — corruptible and run by imperfect humans — and hand them to an incorruptible, open-source software protocol.

On a long enough timescale, anything that software can eat, it will eat. Money is not the exception; there are no exceptions. The decentralized nature of Bitcoin means there's no need for a central issuer — on a Bitcoin standard, money becomes open-source software.

Most people have no idea how powerful Bitcoin can be, or what its societal implications are. If Bitcoin plays out the way I think it will, all of this becomes possible:

  1. The deflationary power of technology is fully realized, and products become dramatically cheaper instead of being inflated by an expanding money supply. When software eats something, it trends toward free — think calculators, photography, and media.
  2. The average person no longer has to rely on non-productive financial services like wealth advisors, 401(k)s, and the predatory financial industry.
  3. Nation-states are confined by a hard money system and can't fund reckless military campaigns the way they have in the past, since the only reason they could pay for them was money printing.

I'll give you another one.

3. On prestige, influence, and credentialism

Given the proper knowledge, expertise, and communication skills, anyone with a laptop and an internet connection can build an audience in any domain and cultivate massive influence. No, I'm not referring to the Logan Pauls of the world or fitness influencers.

I'm referring to the Andrew Hubermans of the world and the Doctor Gabor Mates.

Without the internet, these experts wouldn't have had the opportunity to spread their ideas to the extent they have. They would have had to go through analog media channels, be stifled by limited air time, and much of their wisdom would have stayed trapped in their heads.

Citizen journalists, independent practitioners, self-taught teachers, and their collective intelligence continue to be shared with the world, all thanks to the internet. This is just the beginning.

You no longer need to be sanctioned by "the establishment" to offer alternative opinions and solutions. Diversity of thought leads to a more abundant world.

Perhaps one day we'll look back and laugh at the idea that so few people had audiences and reach, the same way we look back on any single institution having a monopoly on truth.

4. On networks

Religions are networks, colleges are networks, governments are networks. Networks are essentially organizations that bind and direct groups of humans. Eventually, a new form of governance network will be born from the internet — one that competes for citizens with nation-states.

Sounds crazy? This new form of governance is already being tested. It's called a network state.

A network state is a highly aligned online community with the capacity for collective action, one that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.

This would sound far-fetched if it hadn't already happened in history. Humanity went through a similar transition roughly four hundred years ago.

Remember when the Church was the main governing body throughout Europe? It had a standing army and the ability to sentence people to torture — akin to the most powerful heads of state today.

The printing press helped give rise to the nation-state as we know it. The nation-state won't be the be-all-end-all form of governance either. Maybe the network state won't take root, but I think it's inevitable that the internet gives birth to the next form of governance on a long enough timescale — perhaps within most of our lives.

Imagine a world where your property rights are secured by an open network, you can join a community with your favorite thinkers and like-minded citizens, and self-directed learning is the norm, not the exception.

That's where the internet is taking us.

It's taking us to a world where independent citizen journalists, with proven expertise in their given domains, are more trusted than all traditional outlets (MSNBC, Fox, NYT, etc.) combined.

A world where nation-states have to compete for talented and wealthy citizens with emerging network states. A future with 100x more experts, with a diversity of thought and approaches that mainstream media can't structurally provide, and an education system built and designed for the 21st century.

All thanks to the internet.

If you think mobile phones were impactful, just wait until we have mobile citizenship, iron-clad property rights based on cryptography, exponential education, democratized credentialism, and citizenship in the cloud.